Last night I met a guy who got sober aged 21 (he is almost 10 years sober now). This being Southern California (I was in Laguna Beach) where the legal age to drink is 21, meant he did very little drinking that was ever legal.
This just goes to support what I was sharing about in one of my blogs last week, around the legalisation versus criminalisation of new drugs – currently advertised as legal drugs.
My point is this.
Society has completely failed to prevent drugs, legal or otherwise, from falling into the hands of people of any age who choose to experiment with them, or who go down the path of addiction.
Being of legal age has absolutely no ability to stop people from drinking, so why would making drugs illegal stop people from consuming them.
The threat of punishment seems to hold no gravity to the lure of the next high.
We’ve lost the battle to prevent it, so where do we go next?
Why do we believe that criminalising our society members who make a personal choice to exercise their freedom of choice and use drink or drugs seems highly hypocritical compared to the right to bear firearms by people over the age of 18 (or even less) in some states.
I am against the way society feels it is protecting itself by criminalising people who use to enhance their lives by poisoning their own bodies. Who are the people who make these laws, and have they ever experimented with drugs themselves to be able to make such a judgement on why people who do such behaviours are justifiably behaving criminally?
You see, when I was a young teenager and I was told that smoking marijuana was illegal and bad for me – a message handed to me by teachers and other people who represented society to my adolescent mind, and I tried it for myself, what do you think happened when I discovered that I liked it?
Yes, when I discovered that I liked the effect that marijuana had upon me, and I considered how I was told it was harmful to me – I found the information to be biased and untested. Contempt prior to investigation comes to mind. So I made a decision there and then to be distrustful of society, it’s laws and the people that govern me.
I simply chose to believe my own senses rather than be told what to do by people that I failed to believe actually knew first hand.
And so with time, I dropped out.
I simply dropped out of society.
This was the road towards me becoming an Outlaw.
I began living outside of the law and lived off my wits in an attempt to not get caught.
And I guess I was fairly successful at “not getting caught” for the larger part of my life (although, I was also unsuccessful in other parts).
I believe that society needs to understand that the fundamental reason why people use drink and drugs – is because they make users feel better – they work! They work so well, that there’s nothing you can tell them about the potential dangers, which can put them off experimenting further.
So let’s stop feeding our young members of society such a lie, and start considering a change in public behaviour. It’s simply not appropriate to make them criminals because of their life choices around consuming substances that make them feel good about themselves.
Please contact me if you think I could help you or a loved one with alcohol detox or drug addiction treatment
